Confessions of a conspiracy theorist

‘You’re one of them anti-vaxxers,’ said the brusque northerner who was seated opposite me at a friend’s supper party. ‘Why do you think I got Covid and was really ill even though I’m up to date on my jabs?’

And he fixed me with a murderous stare. I said: ‘I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick.’ Next to me, the builder boyfriend was wearing his glassy-eyed look of panic.

We can feel a dinner-party vaccination lynching coming a mile off. But this was peculiarly alarming.

The last time I saw this fellow he had been fuming with me for not having the jab. Barely a year later, he was fuming because he had had it.

How am I getting the blame for the other side of the argument as well now? How is that even remotely possible? My host and the other guests were in the kitchen chatting but soon they would return to the table and find me in the midst of yet another one of those rows unless I found a way to defuse it. So much of the past two years has baffled my grasp of social etiquette.

‘Dear Mary, I am unvaccinated. What is the polite thing to say or do at a dinner party when faced with a pro-vaxxer who is furious because he believes his vaccine has not worked and he is holding you personally responsible, for some reason?’

‘Well?’ said the northern chap. I gulped. He looked as though he was going to lean across the table full of Indian takeaway food and slap me in the face with a naan bread.

I affected a deeply apologetic tone. ‘I’m not a spokesperson for non-Covid vaccination,’ I said, carefully. ‘I mean, I don’t know anything.